"Today, Microsoft said its advertisers will be able to target users not just on Web search results pages but directly inside Windows Smart Search. David Pann, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Advertising Group, said in an interview that advertisers don’t have to do additional setup to participate. The Smart Search ads will feature a preview of the websites the ad will send people to, as well as click-to-call info and site links, which are additional links under the main result that direct users deeper into a website to the most likely page they might want." So, you pay for a product, and then Microsoft shoves ads in your face. Scumbags. Then again, they've done the same on the Xbox, which is now virtually unusable due to all the ads plastered all over your dashboard. And then people say Google is bad with ads.

Is it just me or have advertisements being shoved in ones face become so ubiquitous that I don't even notice them anymore. I blindly scroll past them, or my mind treats them as abstract lines of text or colors and refuses to see what they say or what they're for. It's like ad burnout. Moreover, in Firefox my trusty ad-blocker plugin cleanly erases them from most pages anyway. All that being said, I don't understand why advertisers are still willing to pay big bucks for something that is becoming less and less effective or completely ineffective for me.

The term is banner blindness and it's why UI designers are warned to never make anything important resemble an ad in shape or appearance.

Users build a mental model for quickly filtering the relevant from the irrelevant when looking for specific types of information.

The disconnect is so strong that, if a user is searching for a non-ad (eg. a navigation header) and it resembles an ad, they'll often search multiple times without seeing it and may get frustrated and leave before they think to stop and force themselves to methodically examine every element on the page.

It's why advertisers are so in favour of ads like delay-locked interstitials that force you to watch them.